The official account for GM Design is a good follow on Instagram. It's full of sketches from the design team as well as GM design history, including the Chevrolet Engineering Research Vehicle (CERV) team. GM Design describes its latest design by Brian Geiszler as a "simple seat-time Chevy."

It harks back to the Chevy sports car concepts of the 1960s used to explore new ideas and push performance as far as it could be taken. We haven't seen the CERV name since 1994 and the pre-production models of the fifth-generation Corvette. That was designated CERV IV, and the designation on the side of this sketch published on Instagram is CERV 5.

This sketch is much more of a reference to the first CERV car, an engineering experiment that Zora Arkus-Duntov, the patron saint of the Corvette, developed and described as "a design without limit." He wanted the 1960 CERV car, including its mid-engined design, to influence the Corvette. The CERV 5 looks more like something that could be sold as a track day car than a performance testbed, and its formula racer style and lack of equipment required for the road like fenders and headlights tells us that the track is its only intended destination.

It's improbable that the CERV 5 will move beyond a design sketch, but we would love to see that happen. A pure track day car from GM and even a stock race series based around it would be a fantastic halo for the automaker. After all, piston power may be heading to its end days on the road and its future laying in pure enthusiast cars to be trailered to tracks. In the more immediate future, Chevy has its track-focused vehicles like the Chevy Camaro ZL1 1LE and, no doubt, a new Corvette model coming, but a super-sharp track beast would lower the barrier to entry dramatically.